When Kamala Harris launched her White House bid before an enthusiastic crowd of 20,000 people crammed into the streets of downtown Oakland in January, her supporters pointed to her home state as a big advantage, imagining a strong showing in California’s newly important primary launching her on the path to a history-making victory.

Those dreams came crashing down Tuesday as Harris dropped out of the race — an abrupt and anticlimactic exit for a candidate who was once riding near the front of the Democratic field. Beset by dire fundraising woes, toxic campaign infighting and a deeply muddled message, the California senator fell hard from her polling highs earlier this year.

“In good faith, I can’t tell you, my supporters and volunteers, that I have a path forward if I don’t believe I do,” Harris wrote in an email to her supporters. “My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue.”

The implosion of Harris’ campaign — the most serious presidential bid by a Californian in two and a half decades — was the latest example of the Golden State’s deflated ambitions to shape the 2020 presidential primary.

When Gov. Jerry Brown and the legislature moved California’s primary up from June to March in 2017, in a bid to pump up the political clout of the hugely populous and diverse state, many saw the change as a potential godsend for Harris.

U.S. Senator Kamala Harris speaks during a launch rally for her first ever U.S. presidential campaign at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, Calif. on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2019. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)

But an early move by Harris’ campaign to focus less on the key early states of Iowa and New Hampshire and more on states such as South Carolina, Nevada and California backfired. And by the end of her race, Harris trailed steeply even in her home state, where a new poll from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found this week that 61 percent of likely Democratic primary voters thought she should quit the race.

At the same time, California has found that even with its new Super Tuesday primary, it still pales for influence with the far smaller contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, which still command the lion’s share of presidential candidate visits, organizing dollars and advertising.

“We don’t revere our politicians here — we don’t really even know who they are,” said Garry South, a longtime Democratic strategist in the state. “The notion somehow that because Kamala Harris had been in the Senate 15 minutes she would have some automatic home-field advantage in California never added up.”

Before Tuesday, Harris had never lost a political campaign.

The daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, she grew up in Berkeley and went to Howard University and UC Hastings law school. After getting her start as a prosecutor at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, she was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003, ascended to the state attorney general’s office after a photo-finish 2010 election and jumped to the Senate in 2016.

On the national stage, Harris won acclaim among Democrats for her grilling of Trump administration officials such as attorney generals Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr. And once in the presidential race, she soared in the polls after a dramatic debate-stage confrontation with former Vice President Joe Biden in late June.

But from the first days of her White House bid, Harris found herself caught between liberal activists angry about her record as California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, and moderates suspicious of her shifting stances on issues such as Medicare-for-All. She scrambled to pin down a defining message for her campaign, shifting between paeans to truth, pocket-book economic issues and a more forceful embrace of her prosecutor background.

“She proved not as good at answering questions as she was in asking them,” said Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic strategist in Los Angeles who’s worked on many presidential campaigns.

Behind the scenes, her team was beset by internal turmoil, with several high-profile news reports in recent days documenting conflicts between her campaign chair and sister, Maya Harris, and campaign manager, Juan Rodriguez.

As her poll numbers dropped this summer — and she was passed by ascendant rivals Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg — Harris bet her White House hopes on Iowa, moving staff and resources to the early caucus state. But the shift in focus came too late for her to make inroads.

Harris had also struggled to keep up with the other top contenders in fundraising.

“I’ve taken stock and looked at this from every angle, and over the last few days have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life,” she wrote in her email. “I’m not a billionaire. I can’t fund my own campaign. And as the campaign has gone on, it’s become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete.”

More recently, her team worked to accentuate Harris’ contrasts with the president, proclaiming Harris “the anti-Trump” in a new social media ad last month. “She prosecuted sexual predators. He is one,” the ad declared.”

Harris dropped out before the spot had a chance to air on TV.

People hold a Kamala sign as U.S. Senator Kamala Harris speaks during a launch rally for her first ever U.S. presidential campaign at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, Calif. on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2019. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)

Her decision came as a shock to some of her supporters back home. Several of her allies had just launched a new Super PAC to support her campaign, reserving time for a big TV ad buy in Iowa set to begin Wednesday. Her top donors had been scheduled to meet in New York at a meeting that was hastily cancelled. And the senator had already qualified for the Democratic debate on Dec. 19.

“There were great hopes that she would be, in many ways, the second coming of Obama, the female version,” said Robin Torello, chair of the Alameda County Democratic Party. “We thought initially she had as much of a chance as anyone to get there.”

Harris will remain California’s junior senator and face re-election in 2022. Some state politicos have speculated that a poor showing in her home state would have encouraged a primary challenger.

Now Harris’ move — the same week as California’s candidate filing deadline — will avoid the possibility of an embarrassing performance in the state’s March 3 primary.

“She did leap out to run for president prior to really branding herself as a U.S. senator” and building up a legislative record, said Jim Stearns, who ran Harris’ first political campaign, for DA, in 2003. “That’s the challenge she faces now.” A starring role in the likely Senate impeachment trial early next year could help her do that.

No California Democrat has ever won the party’s presidential nomination. The last major California hopeful, Jerry Brown, lost the Golden State to Bill Clinton, 47 percent to 40 percent, in the 1992 primary.

Harris is the second Californian to drop out of the 2020 presidential race, after East Bay Rep. Eric Swalwell, who ended his campaign in July. San Francisco Democratic megadonor Tom Steyer is still in the running.

At 55, Harris likely has a long political future. She’ll immediately be considered among the top potential Democratic choices for vice president and could find herself on a short list for attorney general or even a Supreme Court nomination if a Democrat wins the White House in 2020.

Harris was the first woman of color elected to each of the offices she won, as she reminded her fans on the campaign trail, and one of only a handful of black women to make a major White House bid. Her supporters argued Tuesday that she faced tougher scrutiny from the media and liberal activists than white and male candidates.

“As a black woman in politics, you have to work much harder, arrive much earlier, and you have sets of eyes looking at you differently,” said Lateefah Simon, a longtime Harris friend who worked for her in the DA’s office and now serves on the BART board. “Kamala was inspiring even though in this race she was going up the rough side of the mountain. Her campaign showed little girls like my daughter that they should absolutely be looking at the Oval.”

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Casey Tolan covers national politics and the Trump administration for the Bay Area News Group. Previously, he was a reporter for the news website Fusion, where he covered criminal justice, immigration, and politics. His reporting has also been published in CNN, Slate, the Village Voice, the Texas Observer, the Daily Beast and other news outlets. Casey grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and graduated from Columbia University.